Quotes About Secrecy

For sixty years tens of thousands of clandestine service officers have gathered only the barest threads of truly important intelligence—and that is the CIA's deepest secret.

To the CIA, everyone's an outsider.

The CIA's covert operations were by and large blind stabs in the dark. The agency's only course was to learn by doing—by making mistakes in battle. The CIA then concealed its failures abroad, lying to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. It told those lies to preserve its standing in Washington. The truth, said Don Gregg, a skilled cold-war station chief, was that the agency at the height of its powers had a great reputation and a terrible record.

Under Cheney's direction, the United States moved to restore the powers of secret intelligence that had flourished for fifty-five years under J. Edgar Hoover. In public speeches, the president, the vice president, and the attorney general renewed the spirit of the Red raids. In top secret orders, they revived the techniques of surveillance that the FBI had used in the war on communism. The

their installations. Once a wiretap was approved, Hoover considered it approved forever. Hoover had asserted that the FBI was free to install bugs at will, without informing a higher authority. He told Katzenbach that this power had been granted him in perpetuity by Franklin Delano Roosevelt a quarter of a century ago.

The Bureau had conducted uncounted break-ins and black-bag jobs on Hoover's say-so. The

kings and queens once depended on the mystique of inaccessibility as an expression of power.

Most members of the incoming state legislature took orders from the hooded order, as did the majority of the congressional delegation.

When the grandchildren of these leading citizens later discovered hoods in the attic, or membership lists that included their kin, they could not fathom how such a thing came to pass. They knew the Ku Klux Klan was born in the murk of blood-spilling hate, built around a racial order that would find its most ghastly expression in the laws of Nazi Germany.

Manuel Blum, who many people consider the father of cryptography [encryption, etc.].

Si no tienes nada que esconder, no debes preocuparte por tu privacidad,

The choice to be public depends on the ability to maintain a private sphere of life. We are free only when it is we ourselves who draw the line between when we are seen and when we are not seen.

The choice to be in public depends on the ability to maintain a private sphere of life. We are free only when it is we ourselves who draw the line between when we are seen and when we are not seen.

We are free only when it is we ourselves who draw the line between when we are seen and when we are not seen.

Ninguém (excepto, talvez, um tirano) tem uma vida privada capaz de sobreviver à exposição pública com intenções hóstis.

You want to kill a place, name it. A name only draws the people there who will kill it again. They slice it up or tear it down; they rape the women, burn everyone on pyres, and then, thinking they own it, they name it again. Stupid. Enough to know 'there is a hill and good water, a cross in the road and a strong oak tree.' But do not say it out loud. A home should always stay secret or someone will come to steal it.

I am shocked by the easy attitude of many in the media towards disclosing our Nation's secrets.

As she would later admit, she 'occasionally set up a paparazzi photo or let info slip out to the press'.135

The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.

My parents encourage me to save, but I do buy the odd thing that I wouldn't tell them about.

Bodyguards offer fake security. The real security comes from having your enemies know nothing about you.

Like any good lawyer, I'm going to maintain a confidentiality of advice offered in confidence.

For me, I don't talk about numbers. I've had big contracts my whole career; I just don't like talking about numbers if they're real or not real... whatever offers I've had, I always keep it private.

I don't talk about any of my projects until the production house makes an official announcement.